Writing Poetry
NE
DAY BACK IN COLLEGE,
my roommate, Jim Space, and I shared
our disgust over the poetry that was being accepted by our college
literary magazine. With the aid of some imported beer and a Rolling
Stones record, we wrote a deliberately bad poem. Today I can only
remember a few lines: "Why is it always dark at night, / And lighter
in the day? / No light, no light, to feel the sight / Of my misgiving,
your reliving...." You get the idea. We submitted it to the magazine
anonymously, hoping its badness would shake some sense into the
magazine's staff (of which we were members). To our horror, the
staff--including the faculty advisor--loved the poem. They thought
it was deep. They thought it was moving. In short, they accepted it for
publication.
Jim and I broke into the office that night and stole the manuscript
to keep it from being printed.
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Mick, et alia
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I learned two painful lessons that day. I learned that poetry is a
slippery critter.
It's hard to determine what makes a good poem. People disagree.
Dreck gets published. Good poems languish in obscurity. Even to
the writer, what looks
good one day may look bad the next. And I learned
that you shouldn't drink too much Polish beer while
listening to "Sympathy
for the Devil."
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"Poetry" is the most abused word in the language. Poetry is central to
existence, to the real lives of real people. A poem is not a simple
description of a beautiful person, place, or thing. It's not mere moral
instruction. It's not simple inspiration. It's more than an effusion of
emotion, a pattern of rhyme and meter. But it may involve all of these things.
Most poetry has what
William Wordsworth called "passionate intensity" (though you
want to avoid sentimentality) and/or intellectual depth (though you
want to avoid obscurity). In other
words, it isn't enough for a piece of writing to look and sound like a poem.
It's got to be a poem. Poetry's purpose is not to soothe and relax
("There, there, it's OK, you're OK"). Poetry, as
Ezra Pound
has it, says, "Change your life." He was talking about a
change in understanding, a change in molecular structure, an augmentation of
the soul.
The reader's job is a hard one. It isn't enough to say, "I like
this poem" or
"I don't like this poem." We have to find public reasons for why and
how a poem does or doesn't work.
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Bill Wordsworth, 1770-1850
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